Boho Brad

Male models are not always so vacuous as they are made out to be. Take Brad Gooch. Following his stint on the runways a decade or so ago, this soft-spoken heartbreaker produced, in short order, a Ph.D. thesis on T. S. Eliot, an acclaimed volume of poetry, a collection of short stories, and Scary Kisses, a wry novelistic look at the modeling world. Now, after five years in which he almost (but not quite) vanished from Manhattan's downtown nightlife circuit, Gooch has brought forth City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara (Knopf), the first biography of the polymorphous-perverse genius around whom the New York artistic and literary worlds of the 50s and 60s constellated.

A mordant wit who likened his technically daring poems to unmade telephone calls, Frank O'Hara burned with a hard, gemlike flame on which the whole bohemian galerie of the era—including Willem de Kooning, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and above all Larry Rivers, with whom he had a long and fitful love affair—lit their cigarettes. When, in 1966, the drunken poet was struck dead by a jeep on Fire Island at the tender age of 40, universal gloom descended, and author Gooch makes you feel it. A dashing, "dishy, magisterial biography, City Poet is also, it must be said, a work of

model scholarship.

JIM HOLT